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Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Is this the end of Liberalism in the United States of America?

Have you noticed how unhinged many liberals have become
since Donald Trump won the presidency? Of course you have; you can’t miss
something that extensive and that crazy.

Many liberals, perhaps most, reside moderately to the left
of the political center; but this is about the radicals who hang on by their
fingernails to the left-most edge of the political spectrum, about to slip off
into undisputed madness.

These leftmost folks have disentangled themselves from the
general rules of common courtesy and civility where some may properly disagree
with the ideas of others in a polite and accepting manner. These radicals are
not just disagreeable but are becoming more militant and demanding, and want
not to persuade others to their ideas, but to force their acceptance.

Whereas more reasonable folk hold the position that if they think smoking is a bad thing, they don’t smoke, or if they don’t think
red meat is a good thing, they are vegans, or if they believe guns are always
and forever dangerous and never suitable for personal ownership, they don’t buy
a gun. The leftmost, by contrast, want to totally ban tobacco, red meat and
guns, and will do their best to bring those bans to reality.

Protesting is protected speech in America, and we honor that
right. But increasingly those protests sponsored by liberals turn to violence
and destruction in their infantile temper tantrums of whining and foot
stomping, demonization and name-calling. Demonstrating the character of those
radicals, a Trump golf course in California and his Washington hotel have recently
been vandalized. And if liberals think some group deserves special
consideration and you don’t agree, you are called racist, misogynist, Nazi, fascist,
immigrant-hater, etc.

And now, things are happening that are so bizarre that they
can only be accurately described as deliberately dishonest, or just dumb. California
Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters actually said on MSNBC’s “Hardball” four days
before the inauguration that Trump ought to be impeached. She implied that
Trump had gotten campaign information from Russia, such as the names he called
Hillary Clinton and others, and therefore he should be impeached, after he
becomes president. Obviously, a president can be impeached only for wrongs
committed while in office. Shouldn’t a long-time congressional representative
know that?

On ABC’s “Good Morning America” David Wright attributed the timing
of Trump’s U.S. Attorney purge to Fox News host Sean Hannity, noting the purge
occurred one day after Hannity called for it on TV. These requested
resignations are standard operating procedure when the new president is of a
different political party than his predecessor, and any network news reporter
ought to know that. Yet somehow because Hannity mentioned it on his show
shortly before it occurred, it was Hannity that “ordered” the action, and Trump
would not have done it otherwise. Fake news?

And it is much worse than those examples. Some liberals have
sunk to a level below mere opposition. It is anti-Americanism: not the loyal
opposition, but the disloyal political enemy. Among the more serious
infractions is that appointees and holdovers from the previous administration apparently
have leaked sensitive information to the media, which have eagerly reported
these things, potentially breaking laws and committing treason.

While this behavior has been on the increase for a while,
the election of Donald Trump has been like a dose of steroids, as if his
election lifts the barriers to illegal and unethical behavior. People seem to
have forgotten that, like him or not, Trump is the duly elected president, and
while much of the opposition merely makes things more difficult for him, some
of it puts the nation’s stability at risk.

Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s
Hoover Institution, evaluates these changes in liberalism as follows: “The
recent flurry of marches, demonstrations and even riots, along with the
Democratic Party’s spiteful reaction to the Trump presidency, exposes what
modern liberalism has become: a politics shrouded in pathos.”

He remembers how things were during the civil-rights
movement of the 1950s and ’60s, “when protesters wore their Sunday best and
carried themselves with heroic dignity,” and bemoans today’s liberal marches,
which he described as “marked by incoherence and downright lunacy — hats
designed to evoke sexual organs, poems that scream in anger yet have no point
to make, and an hysterical anti-Americanism. All this suggests lostness, the
end of something rather than the beginning. What is ending?”

He continues, “Our new conservative president rolls his eyes
when he is called a racist, and we all — liberal and
conservative alike —know that he
isn’t one. The jig is up. Bigotry exists, but it is far down on the list of
problems that minorities now face.” Reaching back into his own experiences, he
notes, “I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find an
open door. It’s harder now for young blacks to find a closed one.”

Calling current liberalism “an anachronism,” Steele goes on
to explain that what we have today is not liberalism, but “moral esteem over
reality; the self-congratulation of idealism.” And he concludes with the post
mortem: “Liberalism is exhausted because it has become a corruption.”